Electrical connectors known as pin headers and receptacle connectors are often used to interconnect circuitry between daughter boards and a mother board or back plane. The interconnected circuitry may include ground, signal and power circuits. It is often desirable therefore to have selected ones of the circuit interconnected before the remaining circuits. For this reason the terminal members in the pin header are often arranged in a staged array such that selected ones of the pin terminal members are longer than the others and, therefore, make first and break last when mating or unmating the corresponding connectors.
One way of making such connectors is to supply pin terminal members of different lengths so that as the terminal members are disposed in the pin header housing, the longer ones are placed in the desired locations of the array. This method requires manufacturing of multiple lengths of terminal members as well as increasing the number of assembly steps required to manufacture the connector.
Another method used is to insert all terminal members that are to have a common length using an automatic process and then individually inserting terminal members that are to be longer. This method again requires a plurality of assembly steps to manufacture the connector as well as requiring the manufacturing and stocking of a number of connectors with different terminal arrangements and/or limiting the number of options available to the manufacturer of the circuit board assembly.
It is desirable, therefore, to provide a tool whereby an array of pin terminal members having a common length can be inserted into a header and the header mounted to the board such that the tool that mounts the connector to the board simultaneously arranges the terminal members in the desired staged array.
It is further desirable to have a tool that can be adjusted to provide a variety of different staged arrays using one size connector, thereby reducing the need to stock a large inventory of different parts.